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Archive for April 17th, 2017

by Zahed Haftlang and Najah Aboud, with Meredith May (Regan Arts, 2017)

I, who very rarely buy books and almost never buy them before I have read them (or have at least read an extremely positive review of them), stumbled on this one on a table of new releases at my local Barnes & Noble. The extraordinary coincidences that the narrative is built on are so compelling that I couldn’t resist it. Zahed Haftlang, one of the thousands of Iranian “child soldiers”, and Najah Aboud, a 29-year-old Iraqi soldier, tell their stories in alternate chapters. Thirteen-year-old Zahed, fleeing an abusive home, becomes a medic at the front and witnesses unspeakable horrors. Najah, unhappy to be called up again for the army just when his falafel restaurant is starting to do well and he has just fallen in love, barely sees any action before he is grievously wounded in the battle of Khorramshahr. He comes face to face with Zahed, who is searching the battlefield for wounded Iranians. Miraculously, instead of finishing Najah off, something inspires Zahed to spare him. He then hides him, stabilizes him, and protects him from harm as long as he can, and finally gets him to a hospital. After that, he keeps the strange encounter in his mind for a long time; he prays that the Iraqi will survive his wounds and be able to return to his family.

Najah survives, but he spends seventeen long years in various Iranian POW camps, long past the end of the war. Meanwhile, Zahed spends some time back in his home town, falls in love with a young nurse and plans to marry her, but loses everything when her home is bombed on the day of their engagement party and she is killed along with her entire family. Crazed with grief, Zahed re-enlists and spends several years as a sniper, trying hopelessly to avenge his loss by killing every Iraqi he can. He is captured just before the war ends in 1988, and he spends a couple of years in an Iraqi POW camp, where he is treated brutally by a sadistic commander. But he too survives, returns home, gets married, and starts a family.

Improbably, both men end up in Vancouver, Canada, where they meet again, and Najah is able to pay his debt to Zahed by saving him from his own self-loathing and depression. At the end of the book, each man sums up the impact that their experience had on them. Zahed writes, “Najah, you are the other half of my heart. . . . We saved each other not once but many times over, . . . Your smile turns a light on inside me, and I thought of you often during my captivity to help me survive.” Najah writes, “Some force beyond human comprehension drove Zahed and me to be in the same place at the same time during the war. It is the greatest and most humbling mystery of my life. Zahed, I thank you in my heart every day for removing your finger from the trigger. You may not be my brother by blood, but you are my brother in humanity, which is indestructible.”

Seven hundred thousand lives were lost during the eight-year Iran-Iraq war. Through a twist of fate, these two enemies were destined not only to survive the war but to save each other’s lives and to love each other as brothers. A miracle?